The Zemo Partership met earlier this month to thrash out the pro and cons of future fuel options Plotting the road ahead

The Zemo Partnership held its 20th anniversary conference on Clean Air Day (15 June) at London City Hall. A panel discussion hosted by Andy Salter, MD of DVV Media International, which publishes Motor Transport and Freight Carbon Zero, analysed the debate about pure battery electric versus hydrogen fuels cells.

Salter set the scene by pointing out that if the UK gets decarbonisation wrong and breaks the supply chain, the economy would be “in a right mess”.

Peter Harris, vice president of international sustainability at UPS, agreed and argued that “as a country we need to make a decision on future technology”.

“Last-mile electrification is happening, but the big argument is about HGVs,” he went on. “This can’t be resolved by market forces alone.”

Gaynor Hartnell, chief executive of the Renewable Transport Fuel Association, said that more emphasis had to be put on the existing fleet of trucks as “they are emitting carbon now”, and claimed the “huge role” switching to lowcarbon fuels can play is “often overlooked”.

Challenges ahead

Kate Jennings, policy director of Logistics UK, said that while progress in the logistics sector had always been led by the private sector, the scale of the decarbonisation challenge was just too big for the industry to solve alone.

She agreed that operators “can reduce carbon emissions today with low-carbon fuels – but the government does not recognise that”.

David Cebon, director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight, repeated his long-held view that battery electric was the best route to decarbonising road freight transport, probably even for heavy long-haul trucks.

“Vehicles are going electric,” he said. “Long haul is the big question, but they will also go electric because it will be a lot cheaper. All UK logistics can be done with electric vehicles. They are half the price of hydrogen vehicles and will get cheaper faster as the volume of batteries produced rises.”

But he conceded that the lack of charging infrastructure would be the biggest stumbling block, with operators waiting three or four years for grid connections to depots large enough to charge a fleet of electric trucks. “What will happen when we try to provide 15,000 warehouses with fat grid connections?” he asked.

He rejected the argument that batteries for HGVs would be too heavy, saying the “weight was the same as diesel” and that these battery packs would allow the vehicle to “drive for three or four hours” before needing to recharge. “We need to understand how this will work before we jump into putting lots of charging points into motorway services,” he said. “We can also use catenaries [overhead wires connected to trucks by pantographs] to reduce the size and cost of battery packs.”

Jennings came to the defence of hydrogen, saying that it was already being use to power urban electric buses.

Salter then posed the question of what was the overall goal of government policy – decarbonisation or electrification?

Harris said that while the vision was net zero, it was “important not to overlook the now” and to have short-term milestones. UPS is electrifying its last-mile fleet and using biofuels for its line-haul trucks as an intermediate step toward full decarbonisation by 2050.

“We just have to get on with it, otherwise if we hang around too long we can’t fix it in a decade,” he warned.

Case for renewables

Hartnell was also all for getting something done now and argued that net zero was not the same as zero-tailpipe emissions – an argument the DfT has yet to accept. She said there was a case to be made for “100% renewable fuels in the hardest areas to decarbonise”, a belief that many operators of 44 tonne and above trucks certainly share.

And while sales of new nonzero emission trucks will end in 2040, diesel vehicles bought before then aren’t going to disappear overnight. “Legacy vehicles will be around for a long time,” she pointed out. “If the government becomes too dogmatic, something might fall apart and there is a risk that the policy will unravel.”

With most modern trucks able to operate on 100% biodiesel (B100), Hartnell also called for the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation to be ramped up from the current B7 blend to B20 or B30. “There is no incentive to go to these higher blends,” she said.

Cebon conceded that while 90% of UK road transport could easily be electrified, there might be a case for running the most difficult to decarbonise operations on fossil diesel as “biofuel will be needed in aviation and shipping”.

“The complete ban on internal combustion engines will need to be revisited,” he admitted. n